11 Silicon Valley tech founders who were cast out from the companies they helped build

• Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia CEO following an extramarital affair scandal.
• He's not the only founder to be kicked out of his own company.
• Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Sam Altman have also been ousted from the firms they started.

Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia CEO on Thursday, following an extramarital affair scandal and a board investigation into concerns that he may have been the subject of a "foreign intelligence effort."

It ends his reign at the chip company he cofounded in 1993. Over 33 years, Huang oversaw Nvidia's meteoric rise from a scrappy chipmaker to a multitrillion-dollar AI powerhouse.

Founders being kicked out of their own companies is more common than you might think.

Huang is in good company. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman of OpenAI are among the CEOs who have been ousted from the firms they founded.

Some cases stem from minor disagreements and plunging stock prices, but some CEOs felt betrayed, launched lawsuits, or were arrested.

Here are 11 tech founders who were cast out from the companies they built:

Steve Jobs, Apple

In 1985, nine years after cofounding Apple, Steve Jobs exited the company.

Slumping sales and Jobs' demanding management style led to a clash with CEO John Sculley. The board stripped Jobs, who was nominally Apple's chairman, of his duties, and he resigned.

Jobs then founded another computer company, NeXT, which Apple acquired in 1996 for $427 million. He became Apple CEO the following year.

Sam Altman, OpenAI

Sam Altman cofounded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015 and was its cochair alongside Elon Musk. He became CEO four years later and was the face of the AI boom when ChatGPT launched in 2022.

In late 2023, the board ousted Altman, saying it had lost confidence in his ability to lead the company and that he was not "consistently candid in his communications."

After employees and investors revolted, Altman was reinstated just four days later.

Jerry Yang, Yahoo

Jerry Yang cofounded Yahoo while he was a Stanford student and later became CEO in 2007.

Then, Microsoft offered to buy the company for over $44 billion, a substantial premium on its market value. However, Yang did not want to sell. After negotiations collapsed, Yahoo's share price dropped as much as 20%.

The board faced criticism for its handling of the failed deal, with Yang being pressured to resign as CEO. He stayed at Yahoo in a different role until 2012.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter

Jack Dorsey has the rare accolade of being pushed out of the same company twice.

In 2008, his Twitter cofounder, Evan Williams, fired him as CEO.

Dorsey went on to start Square, the payments processor, before he was brought back as interim CEO in 2015. Not long afterward, Twitter dropped the "interim" from his job title.

In 2020, the activist investor firm Elliott Management criticized Dorsey's divided attention between Twitter and Square, and pushed for his removal. Dorsey stepped down as CEO the following year.

Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX

Sam Bankman-Fried became a poster boy for crypto, and his net worth peaked at $26 billion after founding the crypto exchange FTX.

In 2022, CoinDesk reported that his trading firm, Alameda Research, had a balance sheet largely made up of FTX's own crypto token.

Those close ties panicked investors, who rushed to withdraw their money from the crypto exchange — which didn't have enough to cover the withdrawals, partly due to lavish spending by FTX executives.

FTX filed for bankruptcy, and Bankman-Fried was replaced by John J. Ray III, an attorney who specializes in recovering funds from failed corporations, including Enron.

Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2024.

Elon Musk, X.com

Elon Musk founded X.com as a payments processor in 1999. A year later, it merged with Peter Thiel's Confinity, which created PayPal.

The merged company initially kept the name X.com, with Musk as CEO.

Leadership clashed with Musk over the name, his management style, and his desire to rewrite the platform's main infrastructure.

While Musk was away on his honeymoon, Thiel and his cofounder Max Levchin organized a letter of no confidence. The board voted to replace Musk and install Thiel as CEO.

Martin Eberhard, Tesla

Martin Eberhard cofounded Tesla in 2003, and Elon Musk joined the company the following year.

Although Eberhard had served as CEO since the company's inception, he was ousted in 2007. He later told Business Insider that Musk phoned him and said the board had met without him and decided he should step down.

Eberhard sued Tesla in 2009, accusing Musk of defamation and pushing him out of the company. The suit was settled.

Travis Kalanick, Uber

Travis Kalanick cofounded Uber in 2009 and became CEO the following year.

His leadership saw a string of scandals, and the company was criticized for a culture of bullying and misogyny. Some executives expensed visits to strip clubs, The New York Times reporter Mike Isaac reported in his book "Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber."

In 2017, Uber lost hundreds of thousands of customers from a viral #DeleteUber campaign following accusations that the company intended to profit from President Donald Trump's travel ban.

After a former engineer, Susan Fowler, alleged sexual harassment and HR failures, Uber launched an independent investigation into its workplace culture, which led to Kalanick's resignation.

Eduardo Saverin, Facebook

As depicted by Andrew Garfield in "The Social Network," Eduardo Saverin cofounded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg while they were at Harvard. He served as chief financial officer until he was squeezed out of the startup in 2005.

After Peter Thiel invested $500,000, the company was restructured, and the board issued millions of new shares. This led to Saverin's 30% stake being diluted to less than 10%.

Zuckerberg wrote in an email at the time and obtained by Business Insider in 2012: "Is there a way to do this without making it painfully apparent to him that he's being diluted to 10%?"

Saverin sued. The lawsuit was settled out of court in 2009, restoring his title as cofounder and leaving him with a stake worth over $2 billion when Facebook went public.

Andrew Mason, Groupon

Andrew Mason started Groupon in 2008 as a company that sells discounts on local businesses.

It had a lot of buzz early on, but after it went public in 2011, it started floundering. The share price fell some 90% from its peak.

CNBC's Herb Greenberg named Andrew Mason 2012's "Worst CEO of the Year," criticizing his "goofball antics, which can come off more like a big kid than company leader."

In early 2013, Mason was fired by the board.

Palmer Luckey, Oculus VR

Palmer Luckey designed the prototypes for the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset and raised $2.4 million through a Kickstarter campaign. His company was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion, and is now known as Meta's Reality Labs division.

In 2016, Luckey donated to a pro-Trump group that spread anti-Hillary Clinton memes, sparking a backlash. He departed Facebook the following year.

Mark Zuckerberg denied that Luckey was fired for political views.

In a 2025 interview with "60 Minutes," Luckey said, "Everyone's got a different story, but it boils down to I gave $9,000 to a political group that was for Donald Trump and against Hillary Clinton."

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